Hail To The Chef: Cook, Serve, Delicious Demo

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Games have taught me quite a lot about cooking and running a restaurant, mostly that it’s all about time management. It’s absolutely fine to rush from cleaning a blocked toilet to kneading burger meat into a patty as long as it’s all done efficiently. Cook, Serve, Delicious (!) has an admirable name. I expected another verb at the end, making a full sequence of actions, but why say ‘eat’ when you can shout ‘delicious’? The game is from the makers of The Oil Blue and contains a basic management metagame wrapped around a core of juggling orders, preparing and purchasing ingredients, and trying not to become overwhelmed by gluttonous demands. There’s a demo and even a freeware game of old that this appears to be based on.

I’ve liked games about food ever since Pizza Tycoon somehow grabbed my attention. I was a teenager who leafed past all the new warfighters in the game mags and saw a picture of pepperoni being placed on a pizza, and thought that looks interesting. I was genuinely disappointed when I found out there was a whole gangster aspect to the game because I was just interested in experimenting with toppings.

I like strategies and sim/tycoon kinda games (especially the later), but in most of them the difficulty is not produced by the fact that you are alone to rule a whole country/army/hospital/whatever… Or at least that’s not the main point. However in games such as the one discussed here, it seems to be exactly it – overwhelm someone with tons of actions that require doing in super short time, testing his reflexes, reading skills and button mash. Even though it looks kinda nice and interesting, i know i will end up seriously frustrated by this kinda “difficulty” and delete the game in a burst of rage.

As a chef I have to say, it does feel like that sometimes. i never play these games because it’s what i do for a living and obviously the game is nothing like working in a kitchen in reality, and its not so bad in upper class restaurants where you can spend 2 hours making a sauce because you have a dozen chefs working and a small army of kitchen porters. But when your in a high volume middle class pub kitchen with only two chefs working running two or three sections each with 30 tickets up at all times with atleast 4 meals for each of those tickets on each sections you do feel like a single person fighting an army. and thats without the waiting staff making mistakes on orders and dropping the food along with the 12 hour straight shifts.

Anyhow it does sound like these games do manage to convey that feeling fairly well, i just dont understand how people can find it enjoyable to play, but i guess in a game it doesnt matter if you fail because your jobs not on the line and you can just start again without any repercussions.

The point of this game is multitasking, handling a lot of tasks at the same time. Just like their previous game, which was about managing an oil drilling company, down to the basic tasks, and optimizing your time to do the most at the same time, without machines breaking.

Now it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but some people enjoy multitasking, the pressure of handling several things in parallel. And that’s what these games are about, the setting is just “an excuse” for such games.

There is something in that. The gameplay in this new game seems quite similar to the previous, but the setting is much more likely to attract players. Oil drilling (especially at the time of release) wasn’t really something exciting, or that people would even feel like they can manage. Cooking, restaurants, it’s much more accessible.

It’s not even $10! The only way that could seem expensive is if you’re used to only buying iOS games, where the entire market has fucked itself into nonsensicality through a rush to cheaper and cheaper games to undercut everyone else.

I have come to realize that the amount a person is willing to pay for a game is directly proportional to the number of times they have heard of it.

If you see a game mentioned by only one source, you expect it to be free, or a dollar at most. Any more than that and it will paradoxically seem ‘expensive’ to you, even if you spent more out of curiousity towards a game you’ve heard about from three websites and a friend.